To check if the world is flat, you have to ascend to higher grounds. Alternatively, you enlarge your horizon when you step on other people's shoulders; that is, if you do the right shoulder selection.

This is not a book, it is book-product: the volume is not determined by the subject’s credibility and author’s capability but the publisher’s target price for a hardcover book-product. I bet that the order was placed for 500 pages, and it was missed by only 4 pages. The order resulted in a huge pile of anecdotal examples and opinionated evidences, banal insights and soggy metaphors, altogether an ocean of "stories" written in the "confessional" type of reporting. There are enough sentences for 496 pages but the thoughts in the book would not make more than a dozen pages. And unquestionably, there is a sound value in these thoughts. So, an essay of dozen or so pages on the same subject (which is clusterness, not flatness), well composed, could be a "best of the year" contender. In other words, the book is about 484 pages too long.

One has to give at least some credit to the publisher: the editorial review (printed on the book’s dust cover) trumpets the "breathless narrative", "eye-opening story", "catchy slogans" and "globe-hopping anecdotes"; it does not announce critical analysis, statistical tables and graphs, or solid evidence for the arguments presented.

Thomas L. Friedman: The World is Flat,

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

The only essential requirement to see world being flat

is flat thinking.